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First, a word about Colin Wilson for the sort of people who are on goodreads. Whatever else you can say about him, Colin Wilson was the sort of bookworm who will likely make you seem like a rank illiterate. The man appears to have done all of the required reading and then he kept going and going. He was a crackpot scholar with a novelist's flair. In one of his books, he quotes Goethe and then at the bottom of the quotation there's a note: "My own translation." Because of course Wilson had the skill and the cheek to do so. You might have heard bad things about Wilson or you might have zero interest in his subject matter and I would only respond by saying "Yeah, but he wasn't dull."

This book is an attempt to write a full and complete history of magic in the Western World. If, like me, you've done a fair amount of genre reading, you've noticed that the authors such as Neil Gaiman like to sprinkle in the names of "real" occult figures from history to make their stories more authentic-sounding. Well, every last one of those "real" occult figures is covered in this book. I thought it was great fun. I believe the secret to this book's success is that while Colin Wilson is a nutjob, he's not a nutjob on the subject of the occult. (At least, at the time he was writing this book, anyway.) He maintains some degree of objectivity. He is tolerant towards his subjects. Shouldn't they be dismissed outright as charlatans and crazies? Well, yes, they certainly should, but where would the fun in that be?